sandCat in Dubai

Category: reality

  • waffles and WTF?

    Our weekend started off with a charity evening, namely the Feline Friends annual ball, which was held at the Crowne Plaza hotel in SZR* on Thursday. It had originally been planned for November last year, but due to some legal issues around animal charities, like they don’t exist here officially, it had to be postponed until the correct license was obtained. This was duly resolved this month, probably only after a large fee was paid no doubt, but one of the conditions of allowing the ball to go ahead was that a) it could not be advertised and b) no-one could be charged for it, any contribution had to be strictly a donation. Sadly it seems that the delays meant that the momentum was lost, and this, combined with not being able to advertise, meant that the attendance was rather dismal. The hall could have easily have seated 3 times the amount of people who showed up, in fact tables were set for at least double the number, and I found it heart-breaking to see all the empty places. I really hope it wasn’t a case of people just not pitching up on the night, but I think maybe there was some of this going on as well. Of course we managed to enjoy ourselves nevertheless, and were collected by our saferdriver bang on time.. what a great idea!

    view from the restaurant
    [the view of the Creek from the restaurant]

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  • sand and roses

    Dubai is a dust-bowl today. Driving to work this morning was more hair-raising than normal; not only did I have to contend with the usual aggressive, impatient or just plain bad driving (by other people of course) but the wind was also trying to blow my car straight off the road at the same time. The cherry on the top today was all the sand thrown up by the gale also made visibility extremely bad, this is always a recipe for disaster especially when you have idiot truck drivers doing mad-dash u-turns across a busy road unexpectedly. Anyway I managed to make it to the office in one piece. I did try to take a picture of the dusty conditions on my way in but for some reason my phone was on video mode and took a movie clip instead. It doesn’t really give you a good idea of the situation so I won’t bother to upload it here.

    I have been battling to get rid of a head cold since last Friday, and as a result have been at home sick almost as much as I have been at work this week. I wondered why Stu was so interested in whether I would be in the office today or not, but all was revealed about an hour ago when this lovely arrangement was delivered for me! An early Valentine’s day present. It has really made me feel a whole lot better all of a sudden!

    Valentine's Day

    I hope your Valentine’s day is equally as special!

  • another sign of the times?

    After a few warmer days earlier this week the weather has turned chilly again, chilly and windy in fact. This might be the reason that I have suddenly developed a nasty head cold and am feeling rather grim. It could also be that Stu has just had a cold and I didn’t fight the germs off effectively. Either way the result is the same, and I stayed home today.

    taxis
    [taxis waiting for business]

    However I did have to venture out this morning to the shopping centre up the road, primarily to visit the chemist but also for some groceries, and that is when I took the photo shown above. It seems that a combination of Dubai Taxi’s poor customer service and generally fewer people in town, both expats and tourists, has left the taxi drivers with nowhere to go and nothing to do. So they have turned the parking lot into a rather haphazard and disorderly taxi rank. In fact whilst I was parking the car I watched one fellow reverse into another, complete chaos really.

    In a way I feel almost sorry for the drivers, no passengers means no income, but on the other hand I feel they only have RTA, and themselves, to blame.
     

  • a new outlook

    We moved into our new offices this weekend, which are located at the opposite end of Dubai from where we were, which means its closer in distance to where I live, but with the non-existent roads in the area and the amount of construction going on it might be further in time some days.

    I have a sea-view, well that is if you can call the sliver of water I can see in the port a sea-view. Mostly I have a view of SZR (Sheikh Zayed Road), the metro rail line and the buildings in the Jafza free-zone. I am also on the 13th floor, and have not decided if this should be considered lucky or not. Overall the office is an improvement, its nice to have everyone together in one place. First prize would have been if they had given us new chairs to go with the new desks, the first one I had looked like someone died on it (and not from natural causes either). And if they would get the aircon switched on and would stop testing the fire alarm every 5 seconds we might actually get some work done!

    This is my new route to the office:
    work route

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  • safe, and legal

    This morning I received a rather frantic sounding text message from an old friend back home wanting to know if we were ok as there had been some news on the TV about Dubai, and did we still have our jobs? I would like to reassure you that we are indeed ok, and the news that has been reported on CNN and elsewhere about the US Consulate is, according the Gulf News, not true. It was a fake report about someone who was intending to do something against the consulate, at least according to Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim the Dubai Police Chief, quoted in the story.

    Apparently the officials at the US consulate do not trust Dubai Police’s abilities or do not believe us which led them to close the consulate.

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